PM2 is a production process manager for Node.js applications with a built-in load balancer. It allows you to keep applications alive forever, to reload them without downtime and to facilitate common system admin tasks.

Cluster Mode: Node.js Load Balancing & Zero Downtime Reload

The Cluster mode is a special mode when starting a Node.js application, it starts multiple processes and load-balance HTTP/TCP/UDP queries between them. This increase overall performance (by a factor of x10 on 16 cores machines) and reliability (faster socket re-balancing in case of unhandled errors).

Starting a Node.js application in cluster mode that will leverage all CPUs available:

$ pm2 start api.js -i <processes>

<processes> can be 'max', -1 (all cpu minus 1) or a specified number of instances to start.

Zero Downtime Reload

Hot Reload allows to update an application without any downtime:

$ pm2 reload all

Seamlessly supported by all major Node.js frameworks and any Node.js applications without any code change: